not to complain, or to make this all about me, but damn. a girl can’t even use twitter just to rant and talk shit anymore. folks is watchin. and they take screenshots of my typos.
In reference to this new story: Black 14-year-old Carrying a Puppy Tackled and Choked by Police for Giving Them a “Dehumanizing Stare”
(Source: twitter.com, via sexartandpolitics)
History does not disclose the name of the first black person dragged onto a slave ship, the first black person held in newly constructed prisons, or the first black person forcibly recruited to work on a colonial plantation. But black people have been arriving late ever since, hoping that the slavers have left, the ships traveled beyond the horizon, the whip silenced, the work done, the suffering gone.
Black time—whether you call it colored people time (CPT) or African timing (AT) or the deliciousness of syncopation—black time is about delay, interruption, break: strategic lateness.
Black time is long time, deep time, waiting time, excavated time, time around time. The not-here, the not-yet-there, the it-will-be-coming, the it-has-been-to-come, the it’s-not-wasn’t-yet, the it-was-just-here-yet-to-be-now. The fold, the crease, the wrinkle, the tick that does not tock. The tock that does not talk. The silence that does not break. The breaking that will not be broken. The.
You-just-missed-it.
Black time is hungry time. Ravenous time. Gluttonous time. Cannibal time.
Black time is waiting time, time after the reservation, time after other people’s time, time cut by other people’s time, time as didn’t-see-you, time as can-you-wait, time as you-again, time as I-don’t-have-time-for-this-shit.
Black time is dropped consonants, slipped sounds, skipped beats, don’t-wanna-ain’t-gonna-coz-it-don’t-make-no-difference time. Black time is learned time, doing time, time done, time-to-do, time-never-done, time-undone. Time-served, time-to-serve, time-serving, time-unserved, time-put-off, time-for-time, pipeline-time, skipping-time, cut-time, time-cut, cutting-time.
I haven’t seen you for a minute.
Sorry I’m posting this late. I was running behind.
– Black Time, Keguro Macharia
via naranzarian (via liberatormagazine)(via liberatormagazine)
On Audre Lorde’s Legacy and the “Self” of Self-Care, Part 2 of 3
[Image: from the Black Community Survival Conference, DeFremery (locally known as Lil’ Bobby Hutton) Park, Oakland, CA, March 29, 1972. I first encountered this image via Alondra Nelson’s brilliant book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination.]
“If I were president, I would solve this so-called welfare crisis in a minute and go a long way toward liberating every woman. I’d just issue a proclamation that ‘women’s’ work is real work.”
- Johnnie Tillmon, “Welfare as a Women’s Issue.”
”The modern world hates to see black folks resting.”
- Lewis Gordon, “African American Philosophy, Race, and the Geography of Reason.”
This post is an experiment. It attempts to find a new route to the question of what it means to politicize Audre Lorde’s legacy. Its search is partly in response to what I described in part 1 as the tendency in some cases to deify Lorde by extracting her from the political context in which she lived, or by reducing her to a set of pithy (if brilliant) quotations, or by invoking her as an unqualified paragon of black women’s resilience. In attempting to route the conversation differently, my strategy is to try and glimpse Lorde through an archive that is not of her published writings but of a set of struggles and contexts that affirm dimensions of her humanity and her work that are too rarely emphasized—her struggles with health and wellness, her status as worker, her vulnerability to the very discourses that demand that she be seen as powerful. Doing this means following a route that may, to some, seem rather circuitous. I can only hope that by the end, those divergences will make some sense.
pink pants what.
just don’t ask.
(Source: google.com)
Still waiting for someone to make a parody of the Lean In cover with either Fat Joe mid-“Lean Back” or Young Dro in the throes of “Shoulder Lean.”
signing a contract for an assistant professor position in southern california.
The thing about writing for me is that in each rare moment when I intuit that it’s verging on something that could feel like truth I grow more suspect that I’ve simply found a handy, reassuring subterfuge to escape, momentarily, from the approaching inevitability of contradiction.
This week I finished—”finished”—the second part of the Audre Lorde post that I promised, like, two months ago. Then I decided that I hated it so much that the only way not to hate it would be to scrap it and start over from the beginning.
Part of me misses the time when I wasn’t so aware that stuff I wrote here would meet with semi-intense scrutiny, when I could have just posted that morass of thoughts and been fine with it. I don’t remember ever making the decision that the essay form should be the dominant one that I should be writing in, yet that seems to have happened?
Which returns me to the recursive question: what was the point of writing this blog, again?
live from the notebook.
long day.
This student felt about me the way Drake feels about haters.
And also: this student felt about himself the way Drake feels about himself.
